Geddy Lee gets the crowd going
Geddy Lee stands on the stage at Wembley Arena and takes a picture of the 10,000 people standing before him. Looking like Jerry Garcia's bookish brother, the Torontonian asks the crowd to say hello to Canada. The audience does just this, as it did on this spot the night before, and just as it did in Sheffield, Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham and Manchester. Seventy-thousand pairs of hands, waving wildly, taking pause from a three-hour concert, the complexity of which makes Yehudi Menuhin sound like Chas and Dave.
Rush have never had a hit single. They don't get much press. None of their 23 releases will feature on the 100 Greatest Albums lists so beloved of glossy music magazines. The beautiful people don't know who they are. The studious people who made BBC's grandly irritating Seven Ages of Rock see them as being beneath them. Yet Rush persist, at Madison Square Garden, at Wembley Arena. Their continued appeal (a unique mixture of affection and awe) is a heartening thing. After a couple of drinks I can even see it pointing to there being hope for the future of mankind.
People will tell you Rush are not cool, but they are. Behind him onstage Geddy Lee doesn't have bass amps, he has three ovens, all of which hold racks of rotisserie chickens. To Geddy's right is guitarist Alex Lifeson. Alex has toy dinosaurs on top of his backline. In the middle is Neal Peart, the drummer's drummer. If you close your eyes it's easy to imagine a cartoon octopus sitting at the stool, eight sticks flailing away. Peart once had a drum kit so large it required him to be lifted into it. Folks, look in the dictionary, C.O.O.L. There they are: three middle aged Canadians, progressive, unusual in so many ways.
I'm tired of hearing about Joe Strummer's radical chic. I'm tired of hearing about Joy Division. I'm tired of hearing about Nirvana. Why? Because it's nostalgia, it's irrelevant. Defend yourself against this with the present. Thirty-three years after their first release, at Wembley Arena Rush play nine songs from Snakes and Arrows, their most recent album. These are the actions of a band that still gives a damn, a band whose motivations are more than ego. The audience would have had an easier night had the set comprised more "favourites", but that's not the point. The point is that Rush pulled 70,000 people into the nation's arenas, and each visitor knew the night would hold many challenges. Tom Waits does this, Elvis Costello does it too. But there aren't many bands who do, and none of them do it to 10,000 people a night. You can call Rush what you will, but know them as art.
And how cool is that?
